Gertruida

Gertruida was a "thank you" gift for the writer Annelie Botes. My wife and family enjoy her books.  At the launch of her book, "thula thula", she described how the main character (Gertruida) used to escape into her mind while her father molested her, by making words from the letters of her name.

At the time I was working on Alphabet B and the concept of playing with a limited number of letters instead of the unlimited number of Alphabet B was an interesting spin on the idea. With the set of letters I made a stand on which all the letters could fit, thereby making for an easier shuffling and sorting, similar to the stand in Scrabble.

When the project was done I decided to hand it over to Annelie Botes as a thank you for all the joy we have from her work.

Alphabet was a series of art p...

Alphabet was a series of art pieces that flowed out of the book projects.  I met up with a calligraphy master Heleen de Haas after she took part in a very successful “WOR(L)DS” collaboration project.  At the time I was working on the Book/Text project and the alphabet was the natural next step. The idea was to explore the letter in a 3d form.  The end result was an font designed by Heleen that I converted in to a PC  font. We then set about developing sculptures using the designed font.  The alphabet projects were displayed at a joint exhibition of the “Cape Friends of Calligraphy” society held at the artB gallery.

The Book projects were a serie...

The Book projects were a series of sculpture projects in which I sought to deconstruct the book.  In essence a book is a vehicle to convey content and the idea was to present content in a different way.  In most book art the content tends to become the focus. In the book projects, the content was made very compact so that the focus shifted more to the medium than to the content.  This allowed the book projects to be compact entities that represented singular ideas.